Since 1971, Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) has framed much of its political reality in opposition to the idea of Pakistan. Some things I have heard over the years: "We will never allow Bangladesh to become Pakistan", "Why did we bother leaving Pakistan if we are going down the Islamic path as well?", "Thank god we're not with Pakistan", etc.

My khalato bon (cousin) has direct memories of 1971 and even refuses to eat dried fruit or nuts if she discovers it was imported from Pakistan. She once said to me "Pakistan, ota ekta desh holo naki?" (Pakistan, is that even a country?). This reminds me of the (urban legend?) of post-WWII Jewish consumers who refused to buy the Volkswagen. There is of course little comfort from our nationalist defenses. Yes we are not Pakistan, but it would not take much to tipthe scale. It is only geography (non-adjacency to Afghanistan, no stake in Kashmir) that rescued us from Indo-Pak nuclear brinkmanship and American-Soviet pawn moves. Tariq Ali once wrote that Pakistan was the "used condom" from the Afghan war that America had fished out of the toilet after 9/11.

With yesterday's assassination of Benazir, again the Pakistan shadow over Bangladesh. Palpable jitters on the Dhaka streets. How long before Bangladesh gets engulfed by similar syndromes?

December 24, 2007

It may seem strange that I am praising a work of such unremitting
savagery. I confess that I'm a little startled myself, but it's been a
long time since a movie gave me nightmares. And the unsettling power of "Sweeney Todd" comes above all from its bracing refusal of any
sentimental consolation, from Mr. Burton's willingness to push the most
dreadful implications of Mr. Sondheim's story to their blackest
conclusions.

"Sweeney Todd" is a fable about a world from which the
possibility of justice has vanished, replaced on one hand by vain and
arbitrary power, on the other by a righteous fury that quickly spirals
into madness. There may be a suggestion of hopefulness near the end,
but you don't see hope on the screen. What you see is as dark as the
grave. What you hear -- some of the finest stage music of the past 40
years -- is equally infernal, except that you might just as well call it
heavenly.

Oh, say can you see? With its red and black stripes and black stars
on a green field, David Hammons's beautiful "African-American Flag"
hangs high over the central exhibition space of "New York States of
Mind" at the Queens Museum of Art.

Thus
placed, the flag seems more than an elegantly mordant comment on race
in America. It reads as the symbol of a separate country, a land where
conservative American values are inverted, where liberal tolerance and
reckless creative ambition thrive, and where dissent is valued as
highly as consent. A country called New York City.

It is this
view of New York that the curator Shaheen Merali wanted to frame when
he organized this exhibition for the House of World Cultures, in
Berlin, where he leads the department of exhibitions, film and new
media, and where the show was on view earlier this year.

"The
metropolis of New York differentiates itself from the rest of the
United States in dialectical opposition," announces Mr. Merali in his
opaquely worded but politically obvious introductory wall text.

The
show, which includes about 30 artists who live in or have lived in New
York, is too small, narrow, uneven and confusing to live up to its
grand idea. Focusing on cerebral, tendentious works, it comes off as
more didactic and ideological than imaginatively adventurous. What's
more, it seems less about New York than about the trendy interests of
the international curator set.

Still, this is an interesting,
provocative exhibition. If you want to have a lively argument about the
true nature of New York art, it’s a good place to start.

New York Magazine ran a story
recently on the redevelopment of the Bowery — all the new luxe hotels
or whatever. They had a writer spend one night in an SRO, and the next
night at one of said luxe hotels. At the SRO, he encounters a guy named
Paulie, who is sweeping up:

This isn't just redevelopment as usual, Paulie says as
he sweeps. That's because the Bowery isn't just any neighborhood. "It
is like 42nd Street. Like Harlem. Names that mean something. Those
places you don't just rebuild. You’ve got to rebrand them. The Bowery
is being rebranded."

I'm amused that even the guy who sweeps up at a Bowery fleabag is comfortable with "rebranding" as a concept.

I was also amused by the story's subhead, which refers to the Bowery
as "America’s greatest skid row." I think I missed the issue of Conde
Nast Traveller where they ranked all the "skid rows."

Read the NYMAg piece:

Down and Out and ... Up and In on the BoweryFrom the Whitehouse Hotel, the street's last SRO, to the door (manned by red-coated doormen) of the Bowery Hotel is only 35 steps for a reporter—but a giant leap into the rebranded, denatured future of America's greatest skid row.By Mark JacobsonPublished Dec 10, 2007